Adventures in the Orgasmatron: How the Sexual Revolution Came to America

by Turner, Christopher

  When he arrived at Esalen, Perls still retained a superficial veneer of respectability—he wore shirts and sport jackets. An early experimenter with LSD, he soon swapped these for brightly colored jumpsuits, walked barefoot, and grew his beard and hair long so that he resembled a dissolute Santa Claus. Laura Perls described her by then estranged husband as “half prophet, half bum.” His neck was draped with strings of beads given to him by his many lovers, and he had a stone house built for himself on a cliff top, a round gun turret of a structure surrounded by eucalyptus trees, where he’d stage his group therapy sessions. It had a panoramic view over the Pacific Ocean and a balcony that looked directly down on Esalen’s sulfur baths.

  Perls, who turned seventy-one in 1964, used to drive a small car down to the bathtubs at five o’clock every day because his weak heart couldn’t take the walk up and down the steep hill. Even so, he had a reputation as the pasha of the hot springs, where only the severely repressed would keep their clothes on, and he would successfully seduce women with such memorable lines as “You vant to suck my cock?”25 His student Ilana Rubenfeld said that “women went up and wanted to have sex with Fritz all the time,” and Perls boasted of these encounters in his rambling autobiography; he described himself as a polymorphous pervert.26 “I like my reputation as being both a dirty old man and a guru,” Perls wrote. “Unfortunately the first is on the wane and the second ascending.”27

  At Esalen people would come from Los Angeles and San Francisco to see Perls and his volunteers perform Gestalt therapy. He conducted his weekend “circus,” as he called the public version of his act, in front of hundreds of onlookers. Perls once said that Freud had come up with the setup of his treatment room, where he sat behind his patients as they lay on the couch, because he was a mediocre hypnotist and hated eye contact. Perls’s mise-en-scène was, by contrast, organized around his own exhibitionism. He was the director and was also at center stage; beside him was an empty chair, known as the “hot seat,” a kind of therapeutic electric chair into which he’d invite volunteers who wished to work with him.

  Perls would get his actors to move between the hot seat and another empty chair, playing out their conflicts, angers, and fears in an imaginary dialogue with themselves. This dramatized the perpetual battle between the “top dog,” as he referred to the superego, versus the “underdog,” or the rebellious id; of course, it was the underdog that Perls sought to release by making it aware of its shackles. He would sit there, chain-smoking, as he watched and dissected his victims’ performances, getting them to repeat bits of dialogue that seemed inauthentic and commenting on how their bodies betrayed their various blocks. He was a master of improvisation and was often curt, rude, and scornful. Participants were encouraged, even expected, to be violently self-expressive (“Shit or get off the pot,” Perls told them); they would often sob, scream, and verbally or physically attack him or other members of the group. After patients had finished working with Perls in the hot seat, it was customary for them to kiss him on the forehead, awarding him the honor accorded a traditional guru.

  Perls was a master at stage-managing epiphanies. His brand of confrontational therapy became popular with an emerging counterculture already much impressed with Reich’s thinking. It was, according to one of his students, “a theatrical and highly cathartic-orientated approach, arrogant, dramatic, simplistic, and promising quick change.”28 Goodman, who had by then become a star speaker at university campuses, visited Perls at Esalen and remarked that the bawdy, hippyish scene he presided over was “pathetic.” He compared Perls’s “hit and run” demonstration style to a one-night stand.

  Perls sought to reintegrate people’s fractured selves so that they could reclaim a sense of “wholeness” and “authenticity.” He referred to his technique as akin to brainwashing, by which he meant not indoctrination but “washing the brain of all the mental muck we are carrying with us.”29 He didn’t seem to realize that his ordering his patients to be more “genuine” and “authentic” might itself be a form of indoctrination. Perls’s cultish and oft-repeated slogans were “Be here now,” “Live in the present,” “Re-own your projections,” and “Be truly yourself.” But if all one’s repressions were exorcised, what was one left with?

  Perls started his workshops by getting everyone to repeat the “Gestalt Prayer” after him:

  I do my thing, and you do your thing.

  I am not in this world to live up to your expectations

  And you are not in this world to live up to mine.

  You are you, and I am I,

  And if by chance we find each other, it’s beautiful.

  If not, it can’t be helped.30

  He would end by chuckling “Amen.”

  In other words, Perls’s basic philosophy was to be individualistic and self-interested (Perls’s poem was prominently displayed at Sexual Freedom League parties, where it was known as the “Swinger’s Credo”).31 For Perls, accusations of selfishness were just moralistic manipulations, an attempt by others to say, “Satisfy myself, not yourself.” Dick Price, one of the Esalen founders whom Perls had trained as a Gestalt therapist, took from the training this central lesson: “I think one of the really important things Fritz taught me is to be selfish, rather than continually driving myself ‘unselfishly’—giving out and giving up.”32 The philosopher and student of Zen Alan Watts likewise recalled:

  What I learned from Fritz was the courage to be me…There are times when the most loving thing you could do for other people is to be honestly selfish and say what you want. Because if you don’t do that you will deceive them by making promises to do things which you are not going to come through with. So if you say, quite frankly, “Sorry. I can’t be bothered with this. It’s too much,” they are not deceived. And I think that’s one of the most important things Fritz had to say. To be honestly selfish is sometimes much kinder than being formally loving.33

  It was in Perls’s philosophy of selfishness that sex, so large a part of Esalen’s brand of mystical psychoanalysis, and radical politics began slowly to become unstuck. By the end of the sixties, when Esalen was at the height of its notoriety, even Perls saw that there was a problem. The Esalen Institute opened a branch in San Francisco, which attracted 10,000 people in the first two months; hundreds of hippies camped in the hills all around Esalen, and businessmen, lawyers, and doctors flocked there on weekends hoping to recover their dead feelings and get back in touch with their sensual and physical selves. Centers modeled on Esalen sprouted up all over America: by the early 1970s there were more than a hundred such centers of the “human potential movement” offering yoga, meditation, massage, nude therapy, encounter groups, and Gestalt therapy—all offering, as Perls put it, “instant joy.”34 Esalen, Perls lamented, was threatened with being “drowned in a wave of faddism and fashion.” It was becoming a kind of rehabilitation center for lost souls—or, as Perls put it, a “spiritual Coney Island”—and he distanced himself from its tantric mysticism.35

  Not only was Perls dismayed by how Esalen was becoming corporate and diluted by wishy-washy religious programs—“the discarded soul was making a commercial reentry,” Perls said, in acknowledgment of Esalen’s sudden profitability—but he also dreaded the political situation in the United States. Perls thought he had a nose for fascism; he’d left Germany just before Hitler’s ascendancy, and escaped South Africa before the Nationalists came to power.36 Now that Nixon had been elected president and Reagan had been installed as the new governor of California, he felt that fascism was imminent in America. In his rambling, stream-of-consciousness autobiography, published in December 1969, Perls wrote that he feared that Nixon, like Hitler, would wage a war of “the fits” on “the unfits”; Negroes and hippies would be the new Jews. Michael Murphy, the cofounder of Esalen, said that Perls was “semi-paranoid about the political situation” in advising his friends to keep cash and passports at hand so that they could make a speedy exit. The riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chica
go had been the tipping point for Perls. “Ach, for me, this is the final decision,” Perls told a friend. “We must leave America.”37

  In late 1969, Perls, then seventy-six, left Esalen and bought an old motel on Lake Cowichan on Vancouver Island, Canada, a location that would allow those who might be called up by the draft to avoid fighting in the Vietnam War. Many of his disciples, including Dick Price, then recovering from a psychotic breakdown, followed him there and helped create the Gestalt Institute of Canada (Price renamed the “hot seat” the “open seat” when he returned to Esalen, keen to make Gestalt therapy seem less confrontational). The motel consisted of two run-down rows of clapboard rooms, and could accommodate twenty-five to thirty people. Having pioneered group therapy, Perls now wanted to create a therapeutic community and a college that would correct some of the mistakes made at Esalen. The residents of his “Gestalt Kibbutz,” as he described it, shared cooking and cleaning chores and participated in evening encounter sessions. Perls imagined Cowichan as a “leader-breeder” place where he’d train therapists who would then set up similarly utopian communities all around the world.

  Perls’s project at Cowichan was short-lived. In February 1970, having just returned from a visit to Europe, he was taken ill in Chicago with a high fever and was hospitalized. After an attempted biopsy, the heart that had long troubled him gave out. He died on March 14, 1970. When told by a nurse to lie down, he uttered his last words: “Nobody tells me what to do!”38

  “I read the catalogs of the Esalen Institute,” Herbert Marcuse said in a 1971 interview with Psychology Today. “To me this is sufficient to be horrified. This administration of happiness is nauseating to me. They teach people to touch each other and hold hands!”39

  Marcuse was the theorist who did most to explain the machinations and paradoxes of sexual liberation. Whereas Reich offered the sexual revolution to the world in a box, Marcuse, after the initial optimism of Eros and Civilization, lifted the lid and saw the horrors contained within it. In One-Dimensional Man, published in 1964, Marcuse expressed cynicism about the revolutionary power of sex and the possibility of a sexual utopia in which technology could be used to free men and women, not to dominate them. “It makes no sense to talk about surplus repression when men and women enjoy more sexual liberty than ever before,” he wrote. “But the truth is that this freedom and satisfaction are transforming the world to hell.”40

  Marcuse coined the new term “repressive desublimation” to analyze how societies manage to “extend liberty while intensifying domination”; radicalism was blunted because all liberated desire was swept into an existing capitalist system of production and consumption.41 Advertisers, Marcuse argued, eagerly exploited for profit the new realm of unrepressed sexual feeling and used ideas from psychoanalysis to encourage consumers’ apparently infinite desires and to foster what he called “false needs.” Radical sexuality, for which he’d previously had grand hopes, was co-opted and contained: the libido was carefully, almost scientifically, managed and controlled.

  Like Henry Miller, Marcuse held out hope for the “misfits,” the conscientious objectors who might join with him in the “Great Refusal” of society’s irrational values. In his foreword to the 1966 edition of Eros and Civilization, Marcuse confirmed his position as the antiwar movement’s favorite philosopher by endorsing the radical slogan “Make love, not war!” The book transformed Marcuse into an icon of student revolutionaries; pupils at the University of Wisconsin even tried to set up a version of the erotic paradise that Marcuse had outlined. The historian Theodore Roszak wrote in 1968 that “the emergence of Herbert Marcuse as one of the major social theorists among the disaffiliated young of Western Europe and America must be taken as one of the defining features of the counterculture,” and in 1970 The New York Times called Marcuse “the most important philosopher alive.”42 However, Marcuse’s residual optimism sat uneasily with his comments on the place sexuality had in a one-dimensional, increasingly totalitarian world that could contain all apocalyptical orgasmic explosions.

  The year Reich died, 1957, the sociologist Vance Packard published The Hidden Persuaders, a bestseller about the worrying symbiotic relationship between psychoanalysis and advertising that Marcuse cited as having contributed to his change of view. The book, an attack on Ernest Dichter’s subliminal advertising methods, asked on its front cover, “What Makes Us Buy, Believe—and Even Vote—the Way We Do?” (In the 1956 election Adlai Stevenson had bemoaned the fact that candidates were now marketed like breakfast cereals.) Advertisers, Packard warned, employed “depth boys,” as they were nicknamed, to try to puzzle out in indirect ways what really motivated people so that they could develop marketing strategies to best appeal to their selfish desires and whims. Dichter was, wrote Packard, “certainly the most famed of these depth probers.”43

  “Typically they see us as bundles of daydreams, misty hidden yearnings, guilt complexes, irrational emotional blockages,” Packard complained of advertising’s underhand manipulations. “We are image lovers given to impulsive and compulsive acts.”44 Their techniques were becoming increasingly “scientific,” sophisticated, and insidious: researchers exposed test subjects to a battery of projective tests, psychoanalytic interviews, and free association games. They were subjected to hypnosis, lie detector tests, and eye-blink-rate analysis, all so that advertisers could best determine how to bait their hooks and “invade the privacy of our minds.”45 In one advertising company, Packard noticed, a copy of Reich’s Character Analysis was consulted in the office library.

  By the time Packard visited Dichter, Dichter had expanded his operations to a castle thirty miles north of Manhattan, in Peekskill, a twenty-six-room fieldstone mansion on a hill overlooking the Hudson River that could be approached only via a narrow, winding, mile-long private road. Inside there was a sixty-five-foot living room, a full-sized pipe organ, and an indoor pool. Dichter, dressed in a bow tie and horn-rimmed glasses, was described in the book as “jaunty…exuberant, balding.”46 Dichter called the focus groups he held in his Gothic mansion his “living laboratory.” Children, Packard noted of the panel in progress when he was there, were watching televisions while resident psychologists, crouching behind special screens, secretly filmed and studied their every action so that they could inform advertisers how to subliminally manipulate them. One such session led to the invention of the Barbie Doll. “What they wanted was someone sexy-looking, someone that they wanted to grow up to be like,” Dichter reported. “Long legs, big breasts, glamorous.”47 To Packard, Dichter’s mansion was a sinister factory that manufactured and implanted self-destructive desires.

  Ironically, Packard’s bestselling attack (it sold over one million copies) made Dichter even more successful. It made him an instant celebrity and exposed his ideas to a large audience; he was invited onto TV and radio shows to explain and justify his Svengali-like techniques. A chapter in Dichter’s autobiography is titled “Thank You, Vance Packard.” Some clients even suspected that he’d commissioned The Hidden Persuaders for promotional purposes. Shortly after the book came out, Packard and Dichter confronted each other in a radio debate. Packard argued that, because of his commitment to “self-guidance and individuality,” he had severe reservations about the way “advertisers are learning to play upon [our] subconscious needs without our awareness.”48 Packard thought that science was being used to menace and undermine democracy; he invoked “the chilling world of George Orwell and his Big Brother.”49

  Dichter, however, thought that motivational researchers were the invisible force that upheld democracy: salesmen peddled “a positive philosophy of life” and the people who bought what they sold declared their faith in the future and in the American dream. In The Strategy of Desire (1960), Dichter’s book-length riposte to Packard, he described motivational researchers as “merchants of discontent” who created a world of psychological obsolescence and incessant demand for new things, and he believed that it was precisely in that endless quest and constant striving
that people found political and psychological health:

  Our role, as scientific communicators, as persuaders, is one of liberating these desires, not in an attempt to manipulate but in an attempt to move our economic system forward and with it our happiness…The real definition of happiness is what I call constructive discontent. Getting there is all, not just half, the fun. Stress and insecurity and whatever its labels may be, are the most beneficial movers and springs of our life: Trying to reach a goal but having the goal recede is the real mystery of happiness.50

  Citizens/consumers would never be sated, but would nevertheless enjoy, albeit not without anxiety, the demand feeding of their multitudinous desires. Dichter described himself as “a general on the battlefield of free enterprise.” His was an elitist view: the masses were not ruled oppressively but rendered docile with things and images, like cattle led by golden rings through their noses, so that they wouldn’t rise up and threaten democracy.

  Advertisers, though serving the status quo, quickly allied themselves with the sexual revolution because it was good for business. They found a fertile field in the culture of self-improvement that Perls and others fostered. Perls educated his followers to throw off their inhibitions and gratify their every impulse. Advertisers were there to meet this demand for instant gratification and to help those in the counterculture express their individuality through things. Dichter wrote that the “psychological engineering” he practiced offered consumers the means to achieve “self-realization” through products without guilt. Products were sold as if they were the building blocks of one’s sense of individuality and self-esteem: “Even a simple cake of soap may offer you unexpected satisfaction if you think of it not as a sober or boring necessity but rather as an opportunity for self-expression,” Dichter advised.51 As a result, the Yippies, the radical group who set out to disrupt the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago—who intended, as their founder Jerry Rubin put it, to do “Gestalt theater on the streets,” or “Gestalt therapy on the nation”—all too easily became the yuppies.52